Jean Mill

Jean Mill (Sones; May 14, 1926 – June 6, 2018) was an American cat breeder.

Mill is best known as the founder of the Bengal cat breed: Mill successfully crossed the wild Asian leopard cat with a domestic cat, and then backcrossed the offspring through five generations to create the domestic Bengal.

Mill made contributions to two other cat breeds: the Himalayan and the standardized version of the Egyptian Mau.

Mill and her first husband, Robert Sugden, were involved in a precedent-setting case about the United States government's power to monitor short wave radio communications.

She also authored two books on Bengal cats.

Jean Mill was born May 14, 1926, in Des Moines, Iowa.

Mill attended Theodore Roosevelt High School and then moved to California to attend college.

Jean Mill began work on the Himalayan cat in 1948, breeding Persian and Siamese cats together.

She said she originated the breed by 1954 and was showing off her prizewinning cats by 1960.

There were several other breeders involved in developing the Bengal breed, most notably Pat Warren, William Engle, and Willard Centerwall.

Jean Mill is considered the originator of the breed because she created a domestic Bengal past the F4 generation, and then tirelessly promoted the new breed.

Jean Mill was concerned about the hunting and poaching of the Asian leopard cats to supply the fur and pet trades.

Mill has said that her desire to save the Asian Leopard cat led to the creation of the Bengal cat breed.

Mill claimed that she started crossing Asian leopard cats with domestic cats to help prevent poaching.

She gave two reasons for her breeding rationale: if people could purchase a cat that looked like a wild leopard cat, the actual wild mothers would not be killed in the wild for fur; and the cubs would not be taken to be sold to customers.

Jean Sudgen purchased a female Asian leopard cat (named Malaysia) from a pet store in 1961.

She put a black domestic tomcat in her cage.

The animals mated and produced two kittens, a male and a female called KinKin.

In 1963, Mill lived in Yuma Arizona; it was there that Mill crossed a domestic tomcat with a wild Asian leopard cat.

This mating is thought to be the first documented case of this particular felid hybrid.

In 1970, Mill restarted her breeding program and in 1975 she received of a group of Bengal cats which had been bred for use in Loma Linda, CA by Willard Centerwall.

When Centerwall concluded his studies he gifted the cats from the study to Jean Mill.

Mill used these hybrids from Centerwall in her Bengal breeding program.

Mill's breeding efforts began to take shape in the 1980s.

Mill combined her spotted domestic cats with the Centerwall cats, and with that Mill was able to restart her Bengal breeding program in the early 1980s.

Where others breeders had failed to get the Bengal breed established because of the sterility of the F1, F2, F3, and F4 early-generation Bengals, Jean Mill succeeded.

Mill backcrossed Bengals until she achieved the F5 Bengal with a domestic-cat temperament.

In 1982, Mill obtained a spotted domestic cat from an American shelter.

Later in 1982, while traveling in India, Mill found another spotted domestic cat living in the rhinoceros pen at the New Delhi Zoo.

The zookeepers captured cat for Mill (an orange one she named Toby of Delhi) and that cat's spooted sister (which she named Tasha of New Delhi).

These two cats contributed greatly to the Bengal breed.

When Mill returned to the United States she used the orange spotted cat from the zoo along with the spotted cat from the pound, to breed with the hybrid cats she received.

Mill registered Millwood Tory of Delhi as an Egyptian Mau.

Mill also imported other Egyptian Mau kittens from India.

Mill also needed males to stud the F1 and F2 kittens resulting from the Asian leopard cat since hybrid males are often sterile.

Mill also used Egyptian Maus to raise her F1 Bengal kittens.

Others also began breeding Bengals – and in 1986, The International Cat Association (TICA) accepted the Bengal cat as a new breed, giving them championship status in 1991.

Jean Mill's cattery was called Millwood.

One of her earliest customers was a breeder named Gene Ducote of Gogees Bengals.

Ducote has said one of her favorite Jean Mill quotations is: "Beauty always wins out".